The two married after twenty-year-old Anna discovered she was pregnant. Her upper-crust parents were so incensed at her choice of a husband (who showed up for the wedding toting a half-finished bottle of vodka inside a bag) that they cut Anna off financially. At first, the newlyweds and their infant son, Ilya, survived on Alexander’s slim earnings as a novice journalist and Anna’s pay for scrubbing floors at a tailor shop. (She lost the job after the tailor tired of her “telling them how to work, how to treat people, how to treat her, a university [student],” said a friend, Elena Morozova.)
As graduation neared, Anna chose a literary outcast as the subject for her senior thesis. Marina Tsvetayeva was a great Soviet poet whose work ranged over the human cost of the Bolshevik revolution, her crushing loneliness, and her sexuality, including hints at lesbianism. Her life was tragic: Her poems were suppressed by Stalin’s government, her White Russian husband was arrested and executed, and Tsvetayeva hanged herself at the age of forty-eight, in 1941. The poet was a controversial choice for a thesis at a Russian university. But Anna was mesmerized and would not be deterred.
At home, life was tense. Anna and Alexander argued constantly. Before long, a second child was born—a girl, Vera. Alexander had earned a toehold in television, but his wages were modest and the couple was just scraping by. Then everything changed. It was the mid-1980s, and Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost, or openness, unshackled the Russian press. Alexander became a roving correspondent for a TV news show called Vsglyad, or “Outlook”—a loose version of America’s 60 Minutes. The weekly program electrified the country by daring to challenge the official Kremlin version of events, and it made him an instant celebrity.
In 1990, Anna and her family allowed a Russian filmmaker and crew to share their apartment for six weeks. The resulting documentary, entitled A Taste of Freedom, is mainly about Alexander and the risks he took as a TV journalist challenging the system. But it also provides revealing glimpses of everyday life with the Politkovskys. Alexander, dressed down in trademark denim jacket and red plaid cap crowning his long, wavy hair, plays to the camera. Doe-eyed Anna is coquettish and vulnerable as the housewife.
Her sister Elena told me that Anna was “a crazy mom, very involved with her children,” and that is evident in the film. In one scene, daughter Vera is playing the violin, accompanied on piano by Anna, who insisted that both her children learn music from an early age. (Anna’s friends laughed at their memories of arriving at the door to her apartment and hearing her loud, exasperated voice from inside, “That note isn’t right. Play it right.” It was Anna the perfectionist, but also Anna the realist. On camera, she says that if anything happened to her, Ilya and Vera could earn a living on their own, even if that meant “playing in some restaurant.”)
As the documentary unfolds, Anna is at turns frightened out of her wits about Alexander’s safety while he is on a perilous assignment and chafing that she is stuck at home with domestic chores. Sometimes the dangers follow him to their apartment. Soviets not happy with his reporting leave threats on the family answering machine, including this one from a male caller: “Think about your children. You have two of them, I think.”
Questioned by the filmmaker, Marina Goldovskaya, Anna declares, not entirely convincingly, that she has learned to live with the fear. “I can’t cry twenty-four hours a day,” she says. Should her husband be imprisoned, she adds, friends have invited her and the children to live with them in the countryside far away from Moscow.
As his television career flourished, Alexander began drinking more heavily. Part of it was the lifestyle that came with his fame; when he and Anna were at a party or a restaurant, people rushed to shake his hand and toast him with celebratory rounds of vodka. But she detested his liking for alcohol, especially when nights on the town ended with him being quite drunk, and she felt it was poisoning their marriage.
Anna also fretted over her career ambitions. She had begun writing feature stories for a small newspaper, work that she found less than satisfying. She wanted a career in television like her husband. But he was doing everything he could to block her way, she told friends. In fact, the main problem with their marriage was that neither she nor Alexander was willing or able to play a supporting role to the other, not for any extended period, anyway. Both wanted to be Number 1.
The making of the documentary revealed a preoccupation with her appearance on camera. She was nearly blind without her spectacles, but if she wore them during the filming, no one would notice her best feature—her large dark eyes. What should I do, she wondered aloud. She ended up appearing without eyeglasses throughout the film.
In 1995, she and her husband were shaken by the murders of two friends in Moscow. The television superstar Vlad Listyev, to whom Alexander was especially close, died after being shot outside his house by unidentified assailants, in March. Five months later, the second friend, a forty-six-year-old banker named Ivan Kivelidi who drove around town in a Cadillac and a cowboy hat, went into convulsions in his office, and died. Police said the culprit was a highly lethal poison, either smeared on his telephone or poured into his tea.
Anna’s halting career as a writer began to brighten three years later, when she joined the staff of Obshchaya Gazeta, an independent weekly of note. Her editor was Yegor Yakovlev, the legendary father of the bold newspaper reportage that had erupted under perestroika. The sixty-nine-year-old Yakovlev soon expressed his confidence in Anna by offering her a prized assignment—to accompany him on a trip to Chechnya.
It is hard to overstate Chechnya’s extraordinary place in the Russian soul, firmly lodged there after centuries of writing by novelists and poets—Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Pushkin, and Lev Tolstoy, among others—who romanticized that disorderly southern region. By the 1990s, it was also a seductive place for war correspondents from around the world, and Anna would be no exception. After her first trip there, Chechnya became “a dragon in her blood,” said Elena Morozova. “She didn’t want to live without it.”
Anna did not immediately return to Chechnya. She found a new job at a scrappy biweekly called Novaya Gazeta. At first, she contributed general-interest pieces, including a call for emergency measures to control the march of AIDS in Russia, and a tirade against Russia’s forty million “slaves to tobacco” and their “aggressive and contemptuous” attitude toward nonsmokers.
The hectoring tone of the tobacco commentary illustrated Anna’s lifelong habit of lecturing to people. She told boys whom she heard cursing in public that they were “infringing on my rights. I don’t want to hear that language.” When the boys responded with the equivalent of “Go to hell,” friends pulled her away before the confrontation could worsen. Elena Morozova recalled the sermonizing that three drunks had to endure after asking for money. “I know that if I give you money, you’ll just buy vodka,” Anna told them. “And look how [awful] you look.” Elena decided that her friend had a messiah complex.
Another companion, Yevgenia Albats, remarked on Anna’s stubbornness. Friends often accused Yevgenia of unwillingness to compromise, “but next to Anna, I am the most compromising person on the planet,” she said.
But Anna also was a stickler for ethical behavior. After the Nord-Ost hostage tragedy, she bonded with the survivor group Nord-Ostsi. She was especially close to Elena Baranovskaya, who had lost her son and husband in the shoot-out and gassing that ended the theater standoff. Anna arrived at Elena’s apartment one day to find the survivor group waiting with a cake and a gift of dishes, in honor of Anna’s birthday. Sorry, said Anna, she could not accept the dishes. Gifts were off-limits for journalists, strictly unprofessional. One of the men nonetheless slipped the dishes into the trunk of Anna’s car. A few days later, Anna telephoned Elena: “I’m coming by with the dishes.”